TapouT slapped with another LawsuiT

TapouT just lost a $3.2 million dollar lawsuit for wrongful termination and general assholery on the part of former president Marc Kreiner, but this shit’s not over for the TapouT Crew. That plaintiff was just a lowly sales rep, but some much bigger fish are now piling on.

Likely inspired by Michelle Thomas’s ridiculously large settlement ($3.2 mil for putting up with a shithead boss for 8 months?), Former VP of Sales Lee “Lulu” Lemon filed suit on Monday for a laundry list of claims, including wrongful termination, unpaid wages, misrepresentation, defamation, emotional distress, and negligence. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that his story sounds an awful lot like the one told by Thomas.

Most of Lemon’s allegations are focused on former Tapout President Marc Kreiner, who Lemon claims abused the sales staff, allegedly calling them “f–kng worthless” and telling Lemon that he was “stupid, incompetent, and ignorant,” and that Kreiner could “hire a monkey to do his job.” Lemon also alleges that he was promised $400,000 per year in pay, but was never paid that amount. Instead, he argues, he was not paid the commissions he was owed, was berated constantly, falsely accused of firing employees without approval, blamed for salary cuts, and then directed to “defraud investors … by inflating the sales numbers and at the same time hiding accounts, to engage in thefts from licenses” before he was “constructively terminated” in May of 2010.

Unlike Thomas, Lemon signed a settlement agreement when he left the company that included a promise that he wouldn’t sue. He’s now claiming that agreement is null and void for several reasons, most importantly because TapouT has still not coughed up the severance money he was promised in the deal, despite over 80 gentle reminders.

Sounds like Marc Kreiner is a real peach. Makes you wonder where he is now, considering he’s jumped between different industries multiple times. He was apparently a fairly big player in the music industry, particularly back in the ’70s when he had an impressive list of disco acts and high-profile pussy on his resume. What’s pretty telling from that old 1980 article is this bit:

His business approach is unsentimental: He test-markets every record, suggests re-editing and remixing to make it more commercial and even selects the album cover. If an artist objects to this kind of bulldozer treatment, Kreiner drops the record.

In other words, he was an asshole 30 years ago, and the lovable scamp hasn’t changed a bit.

I was thinking of suing Tapout for general distress, wrongful representation and mental injury inflicted by their fucking nasty designs. I almost clawed my eyeballs out at the last UFC event in Montreal. Those ugly rags were everywhere. The only thing that kept me smiling is the T-Shirt contest FL had a few months back.